In a recent radio broadcast it was said that unbalance in the economy of
our northeast is due to people’s lack of practice in creating business
and to people having “troubles” - the unbalance that there are more
government paid jobs than you would expect and less business initiative
than we need.

Is such an imbalance the people’s fault then? No, the unbalanced
economy is a result of government policy, it is neither the people’s
fault nor accident. We can always feel uneasy when commentators blame
the victims for something going wrong, in this case saying our people do
not have skills, or ambition, or the inventiveness for creating
industry. When in fact government policy frustrated much of the skill,
desire and inventiveness that people have.

During many years it was London government policy rigorously to control
industry and employment in N. Ireland - not a matter of religion, a
matter of control of voting patterns. Many who could not get jobs went
away; many who did get jobs were “encouraged” to live alongside others
who would probably vote the same way as they did, so the voting patterns
could remain stable. Local inventiveness and business enterprise were
not encouraged, and if there was to be enterprise let it be from outside
and place it in areas where voting is favourable to government and so
more jobs will not change the voting pattern. The political situation
remained stable for as long as this system worked. However, to replace
the missing commercial, industrial, financial development which would
normally happen if people were able to think, move and work freely, the
government had to invent jobs. At one part of the prosperity scale it
invented training schemes, at another it invented government-financed
service jobs, while at the same time tolerating, or encouraging, an
acceptable - and calculated - level of unemployment. Or of poverty and
marginal living. The imbalance then between the number of jobs created
by normal free local development and the number of government invented
jobs was a matter of government policy. Result, more government created
service jobs than needed, fewer local enterprise ones than high grade
local abilities should expect.

One test of whether government aid would be given or not to local
enterprises was whether a local enterprise would be competing with
others in Liverpool or Glasgow etc, for if so, the claims of those
“across the water” would come first. The over provision of government
service jobs here then was to keep stability in a situation where
politically inhibiting normal local development should rightly cause
instability.

Or to put it in a nutshell, the problem of unbalance in our economy was
not one of inability, lack of skill, “troubles”, lack of initiative, it
was one of a government policy of inhibiting local initiative and
filling up the gaps - for stability’s sake - with jobs which circulated
money but did not actually create wealth.

Financing such a policy was not a great problem. A government could
inject a lot of money into an area through both benefits and
stability-creating jobs because much of the economic activity so created
was causing money to flow back into the British economy as the money was
spent in various British supermarkets etc. Government money fostering
local enterprise was smaller than it should be, but requests that at
least an equal amount should be spent helping local enterprise as was
spent on attracting or encouraging foreign industries fell on deaf ears.
Nowadays control of voting patterns here is not so important for the
London government, so now they are saying, let’s cut down the number of
government financed jobs.